I don't write this post to try to brag about how many books I've read (I am a professor, and I realize that most people in other jobs, including pastors, wouldn't have nearly the opportunity to read as much, especially heavy academic works), but to give an idea of what goes into the classes I teach, what kinds of ideas I have been grappling with, and give a few pointers to interesting things to read for those interested. As fair warning, many of the reflections I give on these books are pretty academic. If that doesn't interest you that's totally normal, but I know there are some readers who will find those comments useful, and this post is for them.
Asterisks (*) indicate books I mention in my comments.
Church History 1 course
The main primary
texts I read in preparing the course:
- Tertullian. “On Baptism.”
- Cyprian. “On the Unity of the Church.”
- Athanasius, La encarnación del verbo [On the Incarnation].
- Gregory of Nazianzus. “Oration 40, The Oration on Holy Baptism.”
- Augustine. “On the Spirit and the Letter”; “On the Predestination of the Saints”; Confessions, book 7.
- Boethius, La consolación de la filosofía, libro V (The Consolation of Philosophy, Book 5).
- *Anselm, Cur Deus Homo (Why God Became Man).
- Thomas Aquinas, sections of the Summa Theologica on the death of Christ, merits, and justification.
- John Duns Scotus, a short section where he argues for the immaculate conception of Mary.
Secondary
sources:
- González, Justo L. Historia del Cristianismo, tomo 1 [History of Christianity, vol. 1.] This was the assigned textbook for the course.
- González, Justo L. Historia del pensamiento cristiano. [History of Christian Thought.] (I read many chapters of the book to supplement class preparation.)
- Jenkins, Philip. The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia—and How it Died. (Half read.)
- *Pelikan, Jaroslav. The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100-600), vol. 1 of The Christian Tradition.
- *Pelikan, Jaroslav. The Spirit of Eastern Christendom (600-1700), vol. 2 of The Christian Tradition.
- *Pelikan, Jaroslav. The Growth of Medieval Theology (600-1300), vol. 3 of The Christian Tradition.
- *Pelikan, Jaroslav. Reformation of Church and Dogma (1300-1700), vol. 4 of The Christian Tradition. (I’ve read about half of it at this point.)
I could say a
lot about the books I read preparing to teach church history, but I can sum up
my overall impressions in two short imperatives: Read primary source texts
of the Fathers; read Pelikan’s The
Christian Tradition. I have had the goal of reading Pelikan’s 5-volume
masterpiece on the history of the development of doctrine for the last ten
years, but given that I read it at about 10-15 pages an hour, it just takes a lot of time. As an undergraduate, I slogged through the first two volumes, but didn’t
make it past that as it was very heavy going. Coming back to Pelikan nine or ten years later
with a lot more theological perspective, I got a ton out of these books. At
times Pelikan is frustrating because he writes as if you know who he’s talking
about and as if there is no need to precisely locate key thinkers or debates
chronologically. But, if one has enough of a framework for understanding church
history (reading Gonzalez’s books helped here), his books are brilliant. Don’t
read Pelikan expecting him to reinforce your preconceived ideas of what history
must have been like. He is brutally honest with the reality of what was
believed, taught, and confessed by the church over the centuries and has a
pretty strong resistance to partisan interpretations of history. Obviously, he
isn’t fully objective—no author is—but he has a way of putting the reader in
touch with the original sources such that the reader has to come to terms with
what was being taught at that point in history. For understanding how the
church has evolved to teach what it has throughout history, this has been the most
helpful thing I have read.
In terms of the
primary sources, I probably got the most out of reading Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo (Why God Became Man), his philosophical defense of the necessity of
the incarnation on the basis of atonement theory. I had heard (and had
ingrained in me) the general argument before, but had never read much of the actual text. Basically, Anselm says that humanity has offended God’s honor through sin,
incurring an infinite debt, since God is infinite. God cannot forgive that debt
of honor without satisfaction, so he requires a sacrifice that will satisfy his
honor. A human being must offer the sacrifice, but only God is able to provide
such an infinite sacrifice. Therefore, the incarnation is the only way of
satisfying the debt and procuring the forgiveness of sins for fallen humanity
since one and the same subject is divine and human, fulfilling the necessary requirements.
Anselm’s approach has limitations if one approaches it looking for a
comprehensive Christology or atonement theory, but overall I was very impressed
with the argument and underwhelmed by the way that modern critics of Anselm (I’m
thinking of books like Mark Baker and Joel Green’s Recovering the Scandal of the Cross) critique Anselm severely for
failing to accomplish what he never set out to accomplish. If Anselm wrote in
an attempt to show philosophically why the incarnation was necessary, I don’t
think it is fair to critique him for not including certain biblical aspects of
the atonement. While I would modify Anselm’s view to be in line with a penal
substitutionary view of the atonement, there is no reason to see a satisfaction
or substitutionary model as excluding the idea of Christ as victor over evil or
the reality that the cross serves as a moral example. All of these are
complementary, but we shouldn’t underestimate the brilliance of Anselm’s way of
working out the question just because he largely focuses on satisfaction. I found it very interesting to debate Anselm's approach in class with students in comparison with the perspective of Thomas Aquinas.
Ethics course
- Atiencia, Jorge. Victoria sobre la corrupción [Victory over Corruption].
- Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Ethics. (Partially read.)
- *Brownson, James. Bible, Gender, Sexuality: Reframing the Church’s Debate on Same-Sex Relationships.
- Lamb, Jonathan. Integridad: Liderando bajo la mirada de Dios. [Integrity: Leading while God is watching.]
- Stassen, Glen and David Gushee. La ética del reino [Kingdom Ethics]. (I used a number of chapters as required reading for the course.)
- Yarhouse, Mark. Homosexuality and the Christian: A Guide for Parents, Pastors, and Friends.
- Wright, Christopher J. H. Old Testament Ethics for the People of God. (I only read about a quarter of it, but what I read is excellent!)
Certainly the
most interesting and polemical book I read while working on my Ethics course
was James Brownson’s Bible, Gender,
Sexuality. Brownson is part of the Reformed Church in America and has
written perhaps the most important scholarly book seeking to defend homosexual
relationships on the basis of Biblical exegesis. I am not convinced by his
argument, but I think that more conservative evangelicals like myself must interact
with the kinds of arguments we find in Brownson or we will find ourselves
irrelevant in the current debates. If you find yourself wondering how someone
who knows the Bible well might end up affirming gay marriage, read Brownson. (As
a side note, convincing my students that we should actually take these kinds of
arguments seriously was not easy. I don’t think that this issue is a gray area
where Christians can just agree to disagree, but I do think
it is important to listen seriously to the arguments of those I disagree with
and respond to those arguments as real arguments.)
To give an
example of the kind of argument Brownson uses, we can consider his discussion
of how the concept of what is “degrading” or “shameless” functions in Romans 1.
He says, “What is degrading and shameless about the behavior described
in Romans 1:24-27 is that it is driven by excessive, self-seeking lust, that it
knows no boundaries or restraints, and that it violates established gender
roles of that time and culture, understood in terms of masculine rationality
and honor” (p. 218). From my
perspective, a significant problem with Brownson’s argument is that he
basically says that Paul affirms whatever the society would have affirmed
regarding what was shameful and that that
was normatively applicable in his time, but not today. Given that we are
not in a different redemptive-historical moment from Paul, why is it that today
we are at liberty to modify what is deemed shameful and so are not bound by
Paul’s instruction in a more direct manner? There is a lot more to explore on
this point and many others, but it’s worth reading for the way it makes you
grapple with a lot of nuances of the Biblical texts that are easy to overlook. I also appreciate, though have my reservations about, his focus on the "moral logic" of the texts rather than just the fine points of exegetical debate. In my view, he at times uses the "moral logic" he finds to contradict what the text seems to plainly say.
Theology I Online course
- *Bavinck, Herman. En el Principio: Fundamentos de la Teología de la Creación, cap. 1, “La creación”. [In the Beginning: Foundations of the Theology of Creation, ch. 1, “The Creation”.] (Required reading for students.)
- Erickson, Millard. Teología cristiana. [Christian Theology] (10 chapters, required reading for students.)
- Grudem, Wayne. Teología sistemática. [Systematic Theology] (11 chapters, required reading for students.)
All of these readings were assigned for class. While I only assigned about 35 pages of Bavinck, his writing was brilliant (though perhaps a bit too dense for the students—I’ll have to reconsider whether to use it next time) and piqued my interest in his theology, which I had never read before. What I love about this section of Bavinck is how he shows that the doctrine of creation is about far more than just debates over how old the earth is. He brings in a substantial analysis of different worldviews, contrasting what belief in creation means as compared to perspectives like pantheism.
Christology research
- Alfaro, Sammy. Divino Compañero: Towards a Hispanic Pentecostal Christology. (Partially read.)
- Chaves, Joao. Evangelicals and Liberation Revisited: An Inquiry into the Possibility of an Evangelical-Liberationist Theology. (Partially read.)
- *García, Alberto L. Cristología: Cristo Jesús, centro y praxis del pueblo de Dios. [Christology: Christ Jesus, Center and Praxis of the People of God.]
- *Gavrilyuk, Paul L. The Suffering of the Impassible God: The Dialectics of Patristic Thought.
- Green, Gene, Stephen Pardue, and K. K. Yeo, eds. Jesus without Borders: Christology in the Majority World.
- *Sobrino, Jon. Christ the Liberator.
- Sobrino, Jon. Jesus the Liberator.
- Weinandy, Thomas. Does God Suffer?
I have been
rereading and going deeper in many of the areas related to my final research paper
for a Christology course that I took as part of my Master’s degree, looking at
the intersection of the question of divine (im)passibility—that is, whether
and in what sense God can suffer—and the liberation christology of Jon Sobrino.
The key questions are: How does God suffer? How does that relate to his ability
to save/liberate us? While I would not consider myself to be generally
sympathetic to liberation theology, I think there are many positive insights
that can be gained from interacting with such theologians (though often there’s
a lot more chaff than wheat). For example, Sobrino has interesting insights on
the connections between the resurrection and justice for victims of oppression (this can be related to the general loss of the vision of the social dimension of the new creation in much of Christian thought),
on the importance of the historical life of Jesus for christology, and on the
limitations of the creeds of the early church (even while he affirms them) and the ways they produce functional docetism.
Considering how central liberation theology has been in Latin American
theology, it is essential to interact with it to some extent to be taken
seriously in speaking about Jesus in a Latin American context, as one can see in a chapter on Latin American christology in Green, Pardue, and Yeo, on the one hand, and Alfaro's attempts at constructing a Hispanic Pentecostal Christology, on the other hand.
All of these
books were quite interesting in one way or another, but two stand out. Alberto García’s short introduction to
Christology is probably the best go-to introductory book on Christology that I
have run across in Spanish. García writes from a confessionally Lutheran
perspective, but is interesting for the ways that he integrates discussion of
the church fathers, solid Lutheran theology, and draws in some positive
insights of certain liberation theologians, without losing theological balance
in the process (apart from his last chapter, where he was trying as a Protestant to find positive theological value in devotion to the Virgin of Guadalupe and other expressions of popular piety, which just left me scratching my head). It
was refreshing to read someone who can on one page talk about the value of a
Christology from below (starting with the historical life of Jesus) and later defend
a penal substitution model of the atonement.
The other book
that was incredibly interesting and well-written was Paul Gavrilyuk’s The Suffering of
the Impassible God. I largely agree with Gavrilyuk’s opening chapter, “The
Case Against the Theory of Theology’s Fall into Hellenistic Philosophy,” where
he takes on the Hellenization thesis, that is, the idea that early church
theology became hijacked by Greek thought. He does a great job of showing how
even when the early councils were using philosophical categories, they
often did so in ways that countered many of the live options in the intellectual climate of their day.
Surprisingly, I see parallels between some of Gavrilyuk’s arguments and some of
Jon Sobrino’s arguments in Christ the
Liberator regarding how to interpret the councils of Nicea and Chalcedon (instead of being supremely negative about the councils, as many contextual theologians are, he sees in them a creative and useful inculturation, but one that had real limits). While
I am generally sympathetic to Gavrilyuk’s approach to the question of whether
God is impassible (he says “yes, in himself God is impassible, but in the incarnation God suffers
in the person of the Son through the human nature the Son assumed”), there is one point where I strongly disagree.
Gavrilyuk says that if God is inherently passible (that is, if God can suffer
even apart from the incarnation, as many contemporary theologians claim), then the incarnation is unnecessary. This
seems to me to be a completely unwarranted conclusion, since he would need to establish that divine
suffering apart from the incarnation could be redemptive, something he simply
hasn’t done. One could enlist quite a number of arguments to make this point, but the first one I think of is Anselm's argument for the incarnation that I mentioned above, which sees the redemptive value not just in suffering, but in the identity of the one suffering, that is, the God-man who can represent man before God while providing an infinitely valuable sacrifice.
Other books
- Arthurs, Jeffrey. Predicando con variedad [Preaching with Variety].
- Donner, Theo. El texto que interpreta al lector [The Text that Interprets the Reader.]
- Sendek, Elizabeth. Griego para Sancho [Greek for Sancho, the beginning Greek textbook we use here at the seminary.]
- Taylor, Richard A. “Haggai.” In Haggai, Malachi. New American Commentary.
- *Vella, Jane. Taking Learning to Task: Creative Strategies for Teaching Adults.
Jane Vella’s
book became my go-to book in seeking to design class activities for my Church
History 1 course. While it is a little hard to follow at points, it has a lot
of great ideas for creating engaging lesson plans around learning tasks that follow the sequence of "Induction-Input-Implementation-Integration."
Other books partially read
- *Franz, Raymond. Crisis of Conscience.
- Friedman, Thomas. The World is Flat.
- Ladd, George. El Nuevo Testamento y la crítica. [The New Testament and Criticism.]
- Lingenfelter, Judith and Sherwood. Teaching Cross-Culturally: An Incarnational Model for Learning and Teaching.
- Palacios, Marco. Violencia pública en Colombia (1958-2010). [Public Violence in Colombia (1958-2010)].
- Wright, David F. Infant Baptism in Historical Perspective.
Raymond Franz’s Crisis of Conscience is a personal
narrative (an exposé of sorts) from someone who was formerly in the highest
level of leadership among the Jehovah’s Witnesses, but later left the
organization disillusioned at what he found in the process. I haven’t gotten
too far, but it looks very interesting for understanding aspects of how the JWs
operated during some of the most formative years theologically in the
organization (the 1970s, when many thought the world would end, but it didn’t).
